Long term evolution (“LTE”) of the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”), also referred to as 3GPP LTE, refers to research and development involving the 3GPP LTE Release 8 and beyond, which is the name generally used to describe an ongoing effort across the industry aimed at identifying technologies and capabilities that can improve systems such as the universal mobile telecommunication system (“UMTS”). The notation “LTE-A” is generally used in the industry to refer to further advancements in LTE. The goals of this broadly based project include improving communication efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and achieving better integration with other open standards.
The evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (“E-UTRAN”) in 3GPP includes base stations providing user plane (including packet data convergence protocol/radio link control/media access control/physical (“PDCP/RLC/MAC/PHY”) sublayers) and control plane (including a radio resource control (“RRC”) sublayer) protocol terminations towards wireless communication devices such as cellular telephones. A wireless communication device or terminal is generally known as user equipment (also referred to as “UE”). A base station is an entity of a communication network often referred to as a Node B or an NB. Particularly in the E-UTRAN, an “evolved” base station is referred to as an eNodeB or an eNB. For details about the overall architecture of the E-UTRAN, see 3GPP Technical Specification (“TS”) 36.300 v8.7.0 (2008-12), which is incorporated herein by reference. For details of the radio resource control management, see 3GPP TS 25.331 v.9.1.0 (2009-12) and 3GPP TS 36.331 v.9.1.0 (2009-12), which are incorporated herein by reference.
As wireless communication systems such as cellular telephone, satellite, and microwave communication systems become widely deployed and continue to attract a growing number of users, there is a pressing need to accommodate a large and variable number of communication devices that transmit an increasing quantity of data within a fixed spectral allocation and limited transmit power. The increased quantity of data is a consequence of wireless communication devices transmitting video information and surfing the Internet, as well as performing ordinary voice communications. Such processes must be performed while accommodating substantially simultaneous operation of a large number of wireless communication devices.
To provide improved capability to transmit an increasing quantity of data, future communication systems such as cellular communication systems are expected to implement a distributed flexible spectrum use (“FSU”) mechanism. With flexible spectrum use, the base stations of the communication system coordinate reuse of communication resources (e.g. radio communication resources) in a distributed way (i.e., without the use of a central control element) to improve a performance characteristic of the communication system such as fairness, capacity, and efficiency, or some other measure of performance. As a benefit, such a communication system does not require frequency planning or other traditional planning techniques. Instead, the communication system arranges sharing of spectrum communication resources in a self-organizing manner. Hence, flexible spectrum use is especially suited for local area deployments that will likely include small, multiple, overlapping areas (such as cells), placed without overall coordination, possibly by the end users of wireless communication devices themselves.
Due to the uncoordinated nature of communication system deployments, particularly of indoor cellular deployments, self-optimization mechanisms are employed to distribute communication resources among the base stations. For this purpose, a flexible spectrum use scheme may be deployed. In present flexible spectrum use scheduling arrangements operating on cell level, a base station's communication resource reservation inventory is allocated with worst-case uplink (“UL”) interference in mind, which may be unnecessarily restrictive from the perspective of what communication resources may be allocated.
In view of the growing deployment of communication systems such as cellular communication systems and the growing utilization bandwidth for video and other bandwidth-intensive applications, it would be beneficial in the utilization of flexible spectrum use scheduling arrangements to employ a system and method that accounts for interference between wireless communication devices in an area served by one base station and wireless communication devices in an area served by another base station that avoids the deficiencies of current communication systems.